Book Review: Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek

By Andrea Mara

The release date for this novel in America is Nov 10, 2026. It was previously released in the UK.

What if your child didn’t return to you after playing hide and seek?

 Thank you for adding to my existential dread and panic, Andrea Mara! After reading All Her Fault, about a parent’s worst nightmare, I became a fan of Andrea Mara’s domestic thrillers (adapted for the screen as well). Hide and Seek is the kind of thriller you can read in a day or two.

The novel begins when a family has moved into a new house in Ireland. They are in a suburban neighborhood outside of Dublin. Joanna is trying to be excited about the new house and dive into family life with her husband and three children, taking time off work and hoping to meet new friends in the neighborhood. Even so, she feels rather unsettled in the new home, and finds out that once, a little girl named Lily Murphy who lived there went missing while playing Hide and Seek. She believes that in order to find peace in her new home, she must solve this mystery AND find out if it relates to something tragic that happened to her in the past, when she was a child, around the same time little Lily Murphy went missing.

 As the book opens, Joanna’s daughter Sophie was playing hide and seek and she couldn’t find her; it turns out Sophie was in the neighbor’s yard, but years earlier Lily was never found after playing the game…and the neighbor? She was one of Lily’s babysitters. Who is innocent and who is a suspect?

Everyone in the neighborhood, including her husband, has a connection to the disappearance of the young girl.

What secrets is her house hiding?

And will her investigation reveal the secrets of Joanna’s past and the many lies that she has already told to her husband and friends?

This novel was dual timeline and both timelines were interesting. The story of Lily’s family and all of the dramas, affairs, and conflicts of the neighborhood are revealed in the past. In current day, Joanna is quite nosy and not afraid to ask a lot of questions, knock on doors, and take people out for coffee and interrogate them, which I thought was quite funny!

  I think there were a lot of characters, so some readers might have trouble keeping track of how the past characters related to the current-day ones.

My Thoughts

I hate when people say books are unputdownable, but this one kind of was…I inhaled it. My eyes were glued to the e-reader until they hurt and I had to blink. Then after reading, I was looking up Andrea Mara’s entire back list in search of the same thrill.

If you have some sensitive topics, please review content warnings for this novel.

Thank you to Viking Penguin and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.